Wayland

What you got for us?

So, you know, I know some of you love KDE Plasma, but really hate Wayland.

And now that KDE has decided to drop X11 Sport with Plasma 6.8, well, you're probably not very happy about it at all.

Personally, I think it's time to get over it and move to Wayland.

But hey, that's not my decision to make for you.

And this is Linux where you don't, if you don't like the direction a project is going, like OBS for Jonathan, there's a pretty good chance somebody will fork it.

Sonic DE is a community-driven fork of KDE Plasma 6 that aims to preserve and improve X11 support rather than abandon it.

And this isn't just somebody maintaining an old version of Plasma.

And Plasma's theming situation is, well, it's Plasma.

So I mean, what the hell do you expect it's going to be, right? If you're on a window manager, I think the biggest problem is is that back in the day, you know, back when we were a little bit younger, and Drew's actually still in this thing, or at least he was until he joined the Wayland crowd, you had this plethora of ex-org window managers, right? Like you had Xmonad and DWM and i3 and DK and all this stuff, right? It seemed like every other day you were seeing someone had a different window manager you could try.

And they all started off as this blank slate, right? And if you wanted anything, you wanted a bar, if you wanted a terminal or whatever, you had to put all that stuff kind of in yourself.

But now it's kind of like Drew said, if you want to use Hyperland, Yeah, you could start off with Hyperland, just like regular bare Hyperland, but nobody really does that anymore.

You can have notification daemon like Dunst.

And all of these things operate together.

independent of one another but somehow on x11 you've got them to a point where they just sing they work together so seamlessly that it is like it is poetry it to me it is stinking poetry to have all these things that just work together and you are the architect of those things you know um With Wayland, one compositor does pretty much everything.

You know, it's like, okay, so you want window rules.

What you got for us?

So, you know, I know some of you love KDE Plasma, but really hate Wayland.

And now that KDE has decided to drop X11 Sport with Plasma 6.8, well, you're probably not very happy about it at all.

Personally, I think it's time to get over it and move to Wayland.

But hey, that's not my decision to make for you.

And this is Linux where you don't, if you don't like the direction a project is going, know like obs for jonathan you know there's a pretty good chance somebody will fork it and that's exactly what happened here let me introduce to you sonic de the sonic desktop environment sonic de is a community driven fork of kde plasma 6 that aims to preserve and improve x11 support rather than abandon it And this isn't just somebody maintaining an old version of Plasma.

The developers are actively working to create a complex desktop environment, removing Wayland-specific dependencies and continuing development of the X11 components that KD is leaving behind.

The project actually started back in July 2025 as a collection of improvements to KWin's X11 Windows Manager.

What you got for us?

So, you know, I know some of you love KDE Plasma, but really hate Wayland.

And now that KDE has decided to drop X11 Sport with Plasma 6.8, well, you're probably not very happy about it at all.

Personally, I think it's time to get over it and move to Wayland.

But hey, that's not my decision to make for you.

And this is Linux where you don't, if you don't like the direction a project is going, like OBS for Jonathan, there's a pretty good chance somebody will fork it.

Sonic DE is a community-driven fork of KDE Plasma 6 that aims to preserve and improve X11 support rather than abandon it.

And this isn't just somebody maintaining an old version of Plasma.

Now, this is Xorg only right now.

I haven't converted this to Wayland yet.

But essentially what I did is sometimes I do like a VNC where all I have is keyboard input onto there.

I don't have shared clipboard.

I still use X.Org.

But most people these days use Wayland and just know almost every desktop environment.

Most people are huge into Hyperland and other things you've heard about.

Those are all Wayland.

It's like the new blood coming into the space, and they do have support for that.

So that's just something to know.

I almost guarantee you he's not going to have any issues right out of the gate.

But since he's trying Cosmic, which is Wayland-based, all these things are pretty damn new, and it's just not going to be a good experience for him.

so i'm going to save you the heartache from watching this failure we're going to fast forward

after i figured out the control issues we did manage to get through the entire helldivers mission with no further complications so while i wouldn't call today a success it also wasn't a complete failure and i think i'm ready to do a little bit more googling learn a bit more figure out what the heck is going on with my Steam interface here.

And I've gone through different, all kinds of crazy stuff.

Right now, I'm running some nutty experiment of trying Xlibre instead of Xorg or Wayland.

It's going okay.

Maybe making it a new video.